Independent 20th Century is pleased to announce further details of the fair’s fourth edition, taking place in New York City this September 4th–7th, 2025. The accompanying online preview will be available from August 28th until September 12th.

The invitation-only fair, founded in 2022, champions artists and avant-garde movements between 1900 and 2000, and is held at Casa Cipriani at the landmark Battery Maritime Building, which was built in 1909 at the southern tip of Manhattan. 

Independent 20th Century continues its mission to reframe the canon of 20th-century art by bringing together artists from diverse geographies, generations, movements, and styles. Under the leadership of Independent’s curatorial team, the 2025 edition features 31 nominated exhibitors, with solo, duo, and group presentations of works by approximately 40 artists.

This year’s program includes a range of significant solo presentations spotlighting both recognized and lesser-known figures, underscoring the fair’s commitment to discovery across a wide historical and cultural spectrum. Alongside a cluster of galleries showcasing sculpture and installation art from the 1980s to the present, the fair features several self-taught artists, distinctive voices from Latin America, and five pioneering women artists from the Arab world.

By amplifying artists who challenged conventional histories, Independent 20th Century offers a unique platform to engage deeply with the ever-evolving story of modern and contemporary art.

Hales (London, New York) will dedicate a solo exhibition to British artist Ken Kiff with a focus on his time as Associate Artist in Residence at the National Gallery in London. From 1991 to 1993, Kiff had a studio within the museum, with access to the collection day and night—an experience that had a profound impact on his practice. The presentation highlights this significant body of work and is anchored by an important large-scale painting, The National Gallery Triptych (1993).

Weinstein Gallery (San Francisco) will present works by Leonor Fini spanning five decades of visionary imagination. Although she exhibited alongside many prominent Surrealists, Fini refused to join the movement officially, rejecting the misogynist views of founder André Breton. Fiercely independent, she rooted her art in themes of mythology, metamorphosis, psychological drama, and feminine power, describing her paintings as an “unmasking” of a prophetic inner being.

Rosenberg & Co. (New York) will unite a rare selection of 1940s collages, constructions, and paintings by Gertrude Greene, a trailblazing yet underrecognized figure in American abstraction. Deeply influenced by the avant-garde movements she encountered in Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Greene became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group in New York (first initiated by Katherine Dreier) and worked tirelessly to support leftist artist organizations.

Sculpture and Installation Art from the 1980s to the Present

Cristin Tierney Gallery (New York) will exhibit works by Judy Pfaff, whose influential practice over the past six decades has spanned painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Pfaff balances meticulous planning with improvisational decision-making to create her exuberant, sprawling installations, described as “painting in space.” The presentation at Independent 20th Century anticipates her forthcoming solo exhibition at the gallery’s new Tribeca location this fall.

Galerie Brigitte Schenk (Cologne) will spotlight Little White Men, an immersive 1983 installation by pioneering conceptual artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. Blending fictional narratives with Soviet history and social critique, the Kabakovs invite viewers into richly imagined worlds that challenge both personal and political boundaries. In Little White Men, miniature ghost-like figures appear frozen in absurd or futile activity, evoking themes of alienation, invisibility, and the tension between personal agency and systemic control.

Self-Taught Artists

Jhaveri Contemporary (Mumbai) will present paintings from the 1980s and 1990s by Balraj Khanna, marking the first display of his work in New York in more than 50 years. Born in India, Khanna was among a postwar generation of young artists who migrated to London from across the Commonwealth. Entirely self-taught, he developed a kaleidoscopic style of abstraction in which shapes seem to float in vast expanses of color. The presentation follows Tate’s recent acquisition of three major paintings in memory of Khanna, who passed away in 2024. 

Galeria Danielian (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo) will spotlight Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias, who discovered painting later in life while working for the Brazilian state railway in rural Minas Gerais. Improvising with found materials, he channeled a profound connection to Afro-Brazilian traditions and culture into his color-saturated works, which explore themes of spirituality, social critique, and the tensions between progress and nature. 

Jeremy Scholar (London) will feature vibrant landscapes by the Florida Highwaymen, a collective of African American artists who forged their own path amidst the racial segregation of the Jim Crow South. Almost all without formal training, they painted the lush scenery of the Sunshine State—palm-lined coasts, fiery sunsets, and stormy skies—using intuitive techniques rather than direct observation. By selling their work door-to-door and from their own car trunks, the Florida Highwaymen bypassed the exclusionary gallery system of the era.

Voices from Latin America

In addition to Elda Cerrato on view with Galerie Lelong (New York, Paris), Calvaresi (Buenos Aires) will showcase works by Luis Ouvrard, a largely self-taught Argentinian painter and sculptor who spent his life in the city of Rosario. The son of immigrants from the southwest of France, Ouvrard drew on both the flat plains of Argentina and visions of the French countryside to create his dreamlike scenes that merged real and imagined landscapes. COSMOCOSA (Buenos Aires) will spotlight Luis Frangella, a key figure in the East Village art scene of the 1980s. Trained in architecture in his native Buenos Aires, Frangella relocated in 1976 to New York and was active in avant-garde circles, gaining recognition for his expressive large-scale paintings and collaborations with peers such as David Wojnarowicz.

Modern Arab Women Artists

Salon 94 (New York) presents a group exhibition of Dorothy Salhab Kazemi, Huguette Caland, and Afaf Zurayk, who were among the first generation of female Modernists in Lebanon. These three artists each engaged abstraction as a means of navigating changing sociopolitical structures, evolving notions of femininity, and interior life. Caland’s work is currently the subject of her first major European retrospective, A Life in a Few Lines, on view at Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid through August 25th. Richard Saltoun Gallery (London, Rome, New York) brings together Baya, the Algerian prodigy who rose to fame in postwar Paris, and Juliana Seraphim, a Palestinian-born artist who represented Lebanon in several international biennials during the 1960s. Both artists challenged dominant portrayals of women by placing the female gaze at the center of their work. Baya’s joyful, patterned compositions depict autonomous female figures in harmony with nature, while Seraphim explored memory, desire, and the subconscious through a poetic Surrealist lexicon of winged and masked women. Huguette Caland, Baya, and Juliana Seraphim were all recently featured in Arab Presences: Modern Art and Decolonisation: Paris 1908-1988 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, a landmark survey exhibition reassessing the place of Arab artists within the wider history of the 20th-century avant-gardes.